The Republican Party’s soul-searching makeover continued Monday with calls for wholesale changes in messaging and mechanics and a $10 million effort to attract more Latinos, gays and women.

It’s all part of an effort to shed a perception that the GOP is a collection of “stuffy old men” following a shellacking at the voting booths last November.

The turnaround strategy includes a call for supporting comprehensive immigration reform, something that most GOP officials had vehemently opposed until recently.

“This is an all-out effort at inclusion, and it’s long overdue,” said Ruben Barrales, former head of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce who now leads a fledgling, statewide Republican political action committee called GROW Elect.

The revamping is contained in a nearly 100-page report that emerged from a nationwide “listening tour” conducted by Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus.

Among those he heard from was Barrales, who met with Priebus in East Los Angeles last month. Barrales had a simple message for the GOP leader.

“The party needs to support roles models in the Latino community,” he told Priebus. “Identify those people who are in leadership positions now, nurture them and encourage them to run. That’s the only way we’re going to grow the farm team.”

The report couldn’t come soon enough for Barrales, who sees a lack of any statewide officeholders, a more than two-thirds Democratic majority in the state Senate and Assembly and Democrat Bob Filner in the San Diego mayor’s office.

Barrales said turning around GOP fortunes in California won’t happen in the next election cycle.

“It’s taken years to get to this point, and it will take years to get back,” he said.

The RNC report said the way the party presents its positions doesn’t resonate. Focus groups, it said, see it as “narrow-minded,” “out of touch” and as a party of “stuffy old men.”

“The perception that we’re the party of the rich unfortunately continues to grow,” Priebus said.

In a bid to counter those labels, he’s dispatching hundreds of paid workers to predominantly Latino, black and Asian neighborhoods throughout the country.

Ron Nehring, former head of the California Republican Party and vice chairman of the county Republican Party, said the GOP is doomed without Latinos.

“The Republican Party will never again win a statewide election until we fix this problem,” he said, adding that Latinos and Asians constitute about half the state electorate.

“It’s no longer a question of policies, it’s a question of mathematics. And GOP candidates and officeholders have to make it a priority to win the majority of Asian, African-American and Latino voters.”

Nehring sees this recognition as a massive shift in traditional GOP thinking, where many politicians had been reluctant to seek votes from groups they didn’t need to win their own elections.

The chairman of the county Republican Party, Tony Krvaric, ﻿said the report and its 219 recommendations don’t pull any punches.

“This is a great start,” he said, adding that he looks forward to getting technical support from the RNC through improved databases and an enhanced ground game modeled after the Democratic Party and the campaign of President Barack Obama.

Locally, the GOP has launched its outreach effort by identifying more than 700 clubs and groups across the county that it will approach.

San Diego Mesa College political scientist Carl Luna said the national plan represents the most thorough party overhaul in recent memory.

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite this comprehensive,” he said. Democrats went through a similar self-examination and call for change following George McGovern’s 1972 presidential election thumping, he added.

But Luna maintains that the GOP issues go beyond mechanics, minority hiring or simple outreach. They involve core policy positions such as those that oppose any kind of gun control.

“It just doesn’t have broad appeal, especially to centrist independents,” he said. “That leaves two choices — tweak or change positions. But if you’re just tweaking the message without reorienting the brand, you’re going to have a hard time.”

The party’s only other choice given the nation’s demographics, Luna said, is to double-down on conservative principles and get more supporters to the polls.

County Democratic Party chairwoman Francine Busby said a marketing campaign “won’t accomplish a thing.”

Busby pointed out that Obama carried San Diego County in 2008 and 2012, and that Democrats have a countywide voter registration advantage, albeit slim at slightly more than 22,000.

Republicans still have plenty of clout in the region.

In 2010, GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman carried the county, and North and East County voters consistently send Republicans to the Legislature and Congress. Republicans also hold sway on many school boards and city councils.

But there’s no question the party needs work, according to a North County tea party activist, Rhonda Deniston of the group Stop Taxing Us Now. Deniston said she believes the GOP is struggling to stay afloat.

“We’re always open to new ideas and welcome dialogue from people from all walks of life,” she said. “If that’s the way they are now going to reach out, we welcome that. It’s about policies that attract everybody.”